OpenAI is building five new Stargate data centers with Oracle and SoftBank (techcrunch.com)

OpenAI announced it will expand its Stargate program with five new U.S. AI data centers built alongside Oracle and SoftBank, bringing Stargate’s planned capacity to about seven gigawatts — roughly the power needed for more than five million homes. Oracle is developing three sites (Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an undisclosed Midwestern location), while SoftBank is building two (Lordstown, Ohio and Milam County, Texas). The buildout follows OpenAI’s recent news about a $100 billion deal with Nvidia to purchase AI processors and accelerate further data-center construction. The move matters because it scales the physical compute backbone that enables training and serving next‑generation models. Seven gigawatts signals massive energy and cooling demands, increased concentration of GPU capacity, and a deepening commercial relationship between model developers, chip suppliers, and infrastructure partners. Technically, the expansion should reduce latency for regional users, provide capacity for larger-scale model training and inference, and tighten supply-chain integration with Nvidia processors — while also raising questions about grid impact, sustainability, and regulatory scrutiny as AI compute centralizes at unprecedented scale.